ON THE ROAD

ON THE ROAD; Where Steel Was King, a New Spirit Reigns

By R. W. APPLE Jr.

Published: July 30, 1999

PITTSBURGH—
One fine day this summer, wreckers toppled six towering smokestacks along the Monongahela River.

Once part of a huge coke works but long idle, they were the last vestiges of Big Steel left within the Pittsburgh city limits. The mills that once employed tens of thousands of workers and made a third of the world's steel have vanished like ghosts at dawn. Iron City, a k a Steeltown U.S.A., is no more.

But having survived the truly grueling loss of most of its heavy industry, Pittsburgh is alive and well and getting better. It has had not one renaissance but two, and a third is under way, fueled by an intense local pride and a gritty determination to bounce back. Two new downtown stadiums (one for baseball, the other for football), a new theater designed by Michael Graves and a new convention center are on the way. Designed by Rafael Vinoly, the $231 million convention center is to have a roof in the shape of a catenary curve; water running off the building's cooling towers will make it glitter by day, and interior lights will set it aglow at night.

At the same time, Pittsburgh is hard at work, striving to forge a new economic identity as a high-tech center and a regional medical capital.

Cultural life has a fresh elan as well, sparked partly by the hip, innovative Andy Warhol Museum -- ''the posthumous home of the King of Pop,'' as someone called it. The 53d Carnegie International, one of the world's premier surveys of contemporary art, will open in November at the Carnegie Museum of Art with works by 40 established and relatively unknown artists from 17 nations, including installation art and video as well as paintings and sculpture.

The century-old Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, under the energetic, Latvian-born Mariss Jansons, one of the most prominent of the young conductors who have emerged in recent years from the Baltic countries, will open its season this fall not with a safe selection of Beethoven or Brahms but with Schoenberg's immense, romantic, seldom-performed ''Gurrelieder.'' Among the soloists will be two of the more sought-after singers of the day, the Canadian tenor Ben Heppner and the American mezzo-soprano Jennifer Larmore.

And of course Pittsburgh glories, as ever, in its magnificent site, first scouted by George Washington as a British major in 1753. The city lies deep within the Allegheny Mountains, where the Allegheny River meets the Monongahela to form the broad Ohio. Ernie Pyle wrote once that this was a place of ''hills, mountains, cliffs, valleys and rivers, up and down, around and around, in betwixt,'' much better suited to goats than people.

A pair of antique funiculars, called inclines here, still slide up and down the steep face of Mount Washington, across the water from the skyscrapers packed into downtown Pittsburgh at the tip of the Golden Triangle.

Max King, the former editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, who moved to Pittsburgh this year to become the executive director of the $1.5 billion Heinz Endowments, sees a vibrancy in downtown Pittsburgh that is lacking in Philadelphia, and with industry having abandoned the riverfronts, he sees ''a once-in-a-lifetime chance'' to redevelop them to public benefit.

''Pittsburgh's economic troubles spared it the sprawl that is disfiguring Philadelphia,'' he said. ''There, the hole is quickly emptying into the doughnut; all the action is in the suburbs. But Pittsburgh -- the city itself -- is still the center of this region, and it's holding.''

There are, to be sure, plenty of problems. Race relations are not the best. Pockets of urban rot persist not only in the burnt-out mill towns up and down the river valleys and in the slums in the city itself, but also downtown. A tacky T-shirt store and a wig shop stand incongruously, for example, across the street from a new Lazarus department store.

The jury is still out on job creation, here as in other Rust Belt cities like Cleveland and Detroit. Pittsburgh's population is as old as those in some Sun Belt retirement cities, because too many of the area's most talented young people leave in search of economic opportunity.

A City of Amenities

But for those who stay or move here, the amenities are many. Leafy, close-in suburbs like Shadyside and Squirrel Hill. A low crime rate. Good schools. Moderate housing and living costs. Extensive parks. A terrific zoo. Three identical suspension bridges, all painted primrose yellow, crossing the Allegheny side by side. Three substantial universities: Carnegie Mellon, strong in science and technology; Duquesne, known for the liberal arts and law, and the University of Pittsburgh, a medical powerhouse where some of the pioneering work in liver transplants was carried out.

Pittsburgh has its own vernacular. ''Redd'' means clean, as in ''redd off the table,'' and ''youns'' is the plural of ''you.'' It has a certain innocence as well. Maybe, as some here complain, Pittsburgh is provincial (or, to adopt the kinder phrase, used by one local businessman, ''not very cosmopolitan''). But it also lacks the edgy aggressiveness of many larger cities.

This is, after all, the hometown of Fred Rogers, the kids' sweet-natured friend Mr. Rogers, whose program is made at WQED, the nation's first public television station.